matthewkenny.com » Technology

PHP4, IIS6 and 64-bit Windows 2003 Server

Matthew Kenny — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 15:37:02 +0000

If anyone had asked me how to put these three things together a week ago, I would have cringed; my next reaction would be to suggest upgrading to PHP5, using Apache, and one flavour or another of Linux. Unfortunately that wasn’t possible at this point so, armed with the usual developer tools (that is, the F1 key and Google), I set out to get things set up… after all, how hard could it be?

While I’m sure I didn’t say that last bit out loud, I must have tempted fate as I spent the next day or so spouting obscenities at my poor computer whilst flitting about the internet looking for solutions to one problem or another. My first suggestion is that you read the instructions in the PHP manual thoroughly; I glanced over them filled with false bravado based on having installed it on Apache many times, but didn’t really take note of the specifics. This proved to be my downfall, as points five and nine of the general considerations were especially important.

Once everything had been done, though, it still didn’t work – requests just resulted in a 500 error code. After investigating the issue, I found that (on some machines) installing a particular version of ActivePerl on a machine can break IIS. This is because it adds an application mapping for the “.plx” file extension, but doesn’t enter an executable path; and this just breaks the server. Since I didn’t need to be able to serve these files, I deleted the mapping and this made everything work. If you do need to serve this sort of file then I would imagine that entering the appropriate path in the mapping would also solve the problem.

So, I hope that helps someone.

Matt Gets Certified

Matthew Kenny — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:10:27 +0000

Being my first “official” certification, I figured I’d give it a mention. A couple of weeks ago I got sent down to London to do some developer training for a CMS that we’re going to be using quite a bit at the company I work at. At some point, there’s also going to be some interesting work porting existing customer sites to the Sitecore platform.

In the meantime, there’s one large Sitecore project which I’m due to start development on in coming weeks; so I’m looking forward to doing some actual work with it.

I think I might start looking at some proper accreditations in the near future, as they can only help my career prospects, and I think they’d really be quite interesting. The question is whether I’ll have to cough up the money myself or if it will be covered under CPD…

Dell build quality

Matthew Kenny — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 13:48:37 +0000

I’ve always been a bit of a Dell proponent, but recently I’ve been given several reasons to be dubious of the build quality of Dell systems. During my time at LFRS, I received a great deal of kit from Dell; all of which had to be tested before being recorded in the inventory system. I must have tested at least one hundred PCs during my various stints there, and never once did I find a fault with a new PC. There was one incident where a user plugged in a 95W charger (instead of the usual 65W one), and damaged the laptop, we had a technician arrive at the IT office the very next day to repair it.

In 2006, one of my friends bought a Dell laptop (an inspiron 630m), and when I saw the offer, I decided to buy one for myself too. The sales people were helpful, and I was happy with it when it arrived. I elected not to buy the optional 3-year extended warranty, as it was far too expensive for my student tastes. In March 2007, the charger broke (yes, the actual charger unit), fortunately, my lappy was still under warranty, so I got a new one. Kudos. Around a month later, my friend’s laptop developed a problem: the spring underneath the left mouse button broke — the button itself was still usable, but no longer had any sort of haptic response. Unfortunately, that was about a month outside of his warranty (as he bought his about a month before I did). Almost exactly another month later, the exact same problem happened to me. Dell has refused to repair this for free, even though it is obviously a build issue. Liam’s laptop has gone on to develop issues with the display, which I’m thankful to say that mine hasn’t (yet).

More recently, though, is the order that arrived at work on Thursday: bit10 had ordered brand spanking new PCs for the Dev team (yay!). The task of setting them up fell to the bit10 sysadmin (Les), Ross, and myself. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly until we lifted one computer out of a box… we set it right way up to remove the packing foam, and heard an ominous *clunk* from inside the box. Les and I removed the side from the case only to find that Dell had neglected to screw the CPU heatsink onto the motherboard! Surprisingly, the PC booted, but reverting to on-board graphics processing; the heatsink must have damaged the graphics card during transit (I’m just amazed it didn’t knacker anything else [as far as we can tell]). Writing it off as a freak incident, we reached for the next box. Inside this one, we heard more of a rattle than a clunk. Opening this one up, we saw that one of the PCI blanking plates was knocking about inside the case — fortunately, this one appeared to have done no damage.

It is my opinion, that Dell values its smaller customers less: LFRS will, in an average month, probably place around two or three orders with Dell. To my knowledge, this was the first order with Dell from bit10, and it was certainly my first order. I would like to be able to get onto my high horse and say that I won’t be using them in the future, but frankly, Dell does have very good prices, and it’s not feasible to build a laptop from scratch. I shall certainly be keeping my eyes open for alternative vendors, though.